News briefs and information from Federal agencies and Capitol Hill on government activities, legislation, and grants of interest to the telemedicine, telehealth, and health IT community. Edited by Carolyn Bloch.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

TBI System to Advance Research

NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the Center for Information Technology in collaboration with the Department of Defense is developing the “Federal Interagency Traumatic Brain Injury Research (FITBIR) informatics system.

A Request for Information (RFI) (NOT-NS-12-017) was released on June 4, 2012 to enable the acceleration of discovery, advance research in TBI research, and make it possible for the TBI research community to exchange data, protocols, and research-related information.

TBI is a major medical problem that lacks sensitive, predictive diagnostic tools and proven effective treatments. Developing effective diagnostics and treatments is challenging because TBI spans all ages, evolves over time, and includes a wide variety of causes and injury severities.

The FITBIR Informatics system will enable central archiving of data from both prospective and retrospective studies, prevent the data sets from being lost off-line, and prevent long term storage in a multitude of distributed databases and institutions.

The goal is to produce a large rich clinical data set stored in a secure centralized database. The system has to include storage, query, retrieval, off-site backup, and optionally pre-processing, post processing, and collaboration between approved researchers and federal agencies.

The RFI seeks comments on how to develop and implement the FITBIR Informatics System. The information obtained from the RFI will help to improve the design and policies of the system. Input is welcome from potential FITBIR users as well as the broader biomedical research community and other interested parties.

Key research reports:

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